Antimoney or antifreedom?
- Article 2 of 16
- LinuxUser & Developer, February 2004
Is the community really against corporations making money from Linux? Or is it simply against companies that try to restrict users' freedom?
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When Linus Torvalds posted the original Linux code on an Internet newsgroup back in 1991, his terms of use were strict. No one could make any money from it, he mandated. But after some persuasion, he changed his mind. Thirteen years on, Linux is on 22% of all new web servers and will have a similar percentage of the database server market by 2007, according to analyst group IDC: governments and companies around the world are paying plenty of money to have servers and desktops given the Linux make-over.
Love of money may be the ultimate corrupter, however, and, for some people, all this penguin-flavoured cash is proving very tempting indeed. Vendors such as IBM, Sun and HP – once proud owners of their own operating systems – are now directing most of their energy into Linux-based activities. IBM, which invested $1 billion in a Linux-based strategy in 2001, recouped that money within a year. And companies such as Red Hat that once occupied a prelapsarian state of innocence, where they provided both software and support free of charge, are now charging for both.
But there are some who regard this mixing of Linux and money as a fall from grace that should be avoided. Many developers invested many days and months of their free time developing Linux and never asked for anything in return – no one else should be able to either, they believe. Others argue that when there were no real proponents of Linux-based operating systems among the big vendors, there were no real enemies as a result; these new riches will come at a cost – new, dangerous enemies - that could potentially lead to the demise of Linux itself. Perhaps it is best to avoid the exposure that popularity brings, they argue. What are the effects of these disagreements going to be for enterprise Linux users?
Red Hat has received the most amount of flack from the Linux community, as it has become widely perceived as “the Microsoft of the Linux world”. Over the years, Red Hat has often been criticised for making money from the work others did for free, trying to make Linux synonymous with its own distribution, and introducing its own desktop system that supplanted the existing Linux KDE and Gnome desktops. Its latest faux pas has been to discontinue and end support for its free distribution and concentrate instead on its enterprise server and workstation products, offering support only to enterprise customers that buy as many licences as they have servers and desktops and agree not to tinker with any of the code – something, critics argue, that makes a nonsense of the concept of open source software.
Red Hat’s free distribution will still be available as a community project called Fedora, to which Red Hat will continue to contribute, as will the community, the company hopes. But Brian Stevens, vice president of operating system development at Red Hat, says that initial feedback from the community was highly negative. “It was perceived that we were just going to let everyone do the hard work and not do anything in return. When everyone realised that they were perhaps going to get more input into the distribution than they had when it was ”Red Hat Linux“, and that we’d still be contributing, the reaction died down.”
Alan Cox, who was the maintainer of version 2.2 of Linux until August 2003 but is now on a year’s sabbatical, says there are two clear camps of Linux users: the enterprise users and the technical users. Vendors like Red Hat can receive negative feedback from the latter camp when their needs are forgotten about. “Vendors often focus on developing for the mainstream, not the technical guys. Thus, they sometimes feel they are forgotten and people are taking their work in directions they don’t care about, and dumping them in the process.”
But Cox says there is no animosity in the community towards Linux corporatisation per se, only against people who do proprietary – or near proprietary – things with Linux. Given it is the lack of vendor lock-in and its cheapness that is most attractive to enterprise users, the community’s policing of vendor behaviour is a good thing for them in many ways.
SuSE, for instance, has faced criticism for not releasing all its software under GPL and even keeping some source code secret. “It’s not generally frowned upon, but it’s not generally accepted,” acknowledges Jürgen Geck, SuSE’s CTO. “That’s something we’re going to try to remedy.”
It is likely that Novell, previously dead in the water following its struggle with Microsoft in the 90s, will have something to do with this remedy. It is once again being regarded favourably by enterprise IT departments after converting to the cause of the Linux kernel and buying open-source office software developer Ximian and SuSE. By attempting to be a good community member, it hopes once again to be on the enterprise shopping list, knowing that the Linux evangelists that help gave Linux a leg up into the enterprise during the 90s will be loathe to help anyone acting against Linux’s best interests. And if SuSE opens up all its software to the community, anyone will be able to improve it and make it available to the enterprise user as a result – potentially at a lower cost.
Red Hat, too, is keen to keep good will with the community as a whole, says Stevens. In part, it is because open source development processes rely on the community as a whole reviewing code and testing it. Even the mighty IBM, which Cox says many in the community see as “good guys” thanks to vocal backing of Linux-based computing, is finding developing Linux on its Power processor heavy going: despite dedicating more than 300 programmers to the task, it is hoping to get more community involvement. According to Dan Frye, director of the Linux Technology Centre, “one thing we will be doing is working to increase that so it’s more of a community effort and there are more things going on.”
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